Investment In Nutrition Is Crucial – Okoronkwo

What key milestones and achievements has CS-SUNN accomplished in the field of nutrition over the past decade?

Inline with our mandate which I could summarise around to create enabling environment for Improved nutrition among woman and children in Nigeria, we have through advocacy been able to impact possibly in the nutrition landscape, basically first amd foremost, creating an enabling environment for nutrition. We have worked with nutrition line agencies in Nigeria to ensure that nutrition policies not just developed but also implemented. One of the ways is to ensure that these particular policies are operationalised by developing what we call strategic plan of action that clearly look at the policy solutions, putting them in form of roadmap with interventions that  will help solve those problems. We have worked with them both supporting with the support of our donors and providing technical support on most of these policies.

One of the ways is also to see to it that lack of funding which is a major driver of malnutrition is made available to implement strategic interventions that are designed to reduce malnutrition. Through advocacy, we have been able to influence policies, we‘ve been able to push for implementation of these policies which are translated to implementation of intervention which has also reduce malnutrition in several states across the country.

How has the organisation influenced nutrition policy and advocacy in Nigeria? Can you share specific examples of policies or initiatives that have been shaped by the organisation‘s efforts?

In the area of budget advocacy, we also do that. It‘s what we have been doing in the last 10 years. We do budget analysis annually, we identify gaps and make recommendations to government, policy ,Akers on the need for adequate funding for nutrition. Through this, we have been able to see increase in funding for nutrition and also increase for budget performance.

Like in Niger State, when we started working in Niger State in 2014, the budget for nutrition was in the neighborhood of N10 million which most times is used for matching funds to procure RTF with UNICEF. But I can tell you that as for today, Niger State allocates over N2 billion for nutrition interventions.

Also when it comes to funds releases, a typical example is Niger State where it was less than 10 percent or at most 5 percent. But in the recent years, if you look at the trend, there have been years where the budget performance hit 60 percent and more released which was used to implement nutrition intervention across the state.

Lagos state is another exactly, before we stated working in Lagos State, they didn‘t have nutrition policy, they didn‘t have a strategic plan of action for nutrition. With our collaboration and work with them, they have developed nutrition policy and strategy which was launched by the ministry of budget in Lagos State. Their budget rose from less than N50 million to N450million for nutrition interventions across all MDAs.

CS-SUNN has worked with various stakeholders over the years. Can you discuss the importance of these partnerships and how they have contributed to the organization‘s success in improving Nigeria‘s nutritional landscape?

We have been to mobolis non-state actors, Civil Society Organisations faith based organisation who are members of the alliance, and even non-members to speak up for better nutrition for women and children in the country.

We have also tried about creating awareness around nutrition, bringing out the salient issues or drivers of malnutrition in the country and putting it on the front burner so that duty bearers play their roles in making sure that some of these issues are dealt with.